31 Nights of Halloween - Night 4: Haints and Sights

My forebears, Granddad Granvil and Granny Black, transitory as all life is, haunt the rugged old mountains of West Virginia. Once the Appalachians challenged the sky, as sharp and tall as the infant Himalayas of today. Now, though, they are worn down, the eons weighing heavily upon them. For a brief moment, as mountains count time, those old dark hills echoed with the jangle and thump of mountain music, derived from people and places far away in time and space, and the whisper of death sang accompaniment. Bluegrass is a music laden with the life-struggle of the folk who made it, their toil little praised or noticed. But a kind of grim humor always lay just at the threshold of expression, where the inevitability of Death was met with laughter. Sit with me and my ghostly Old Folk now on a dilapidated porch of a long-empty hillside house slumped in a shadowed holler, with no one but the weeds rustling and critters skulking about for company. Listen closely, and you may hear Ralph and Carter Stanley giving the Grim Reaper - or the Devil himself - a musical nod and a grin.